•Yuji Horii, creator of the Dragon Quest franchise, used Anthropic’s Claude tool to develop and release a browser-based video game in under an hour. While it drew some backlash, Horii said he was impressed with the tool, praising AI for significantly cutting development time and boosting efficiency.
Horii has no reservations about lauding AI’s usefulness in game development. He recently used Claude to generate a text-based browser game, comparing the process to making Portopia 40 years ago—when creating a game meant coming up with a story, drawing art, and programming code by hand, often taking months or even years before release. This time, he said he was able to create and launch his new browser game within 30 minutes simply by giving AI a prompt.
In Horii’s newest game, players find themselves in an interrogation room. By asking questions and presenting evidence, they must catch the subject lying and corner him before time runs out or he shuts down. It is a fairly short game that crime enthusiasts might enjoy, though it could easily have been made by humans.
Square Enix has been notably open about increasing its AI usage to improve company efficiency. It wants to hand over the majority of quality assurance and troubleshooting tasks to AI. The studio has also used AI technology in an attempt to improve text-based adventure games, such as The Portopia Serial Murder Case, a Yuji Horii game originally published in 1983.
AI has become a major topic of concern across the gaming industry. It has led to hundreds of layoffs as companies push to use it for efficiency. Large studios like EA have strongly encouraged AI use to boost productivity while saving money. Most recently, Epic Giochi told employees to stop hand-writing code and instead use artificial intelligence. According to Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney, developers were asked to “retool for maximum AI acceleration” so they can produce “more and better stuff.” This followed the announcement that a Star Wars and Marvel crossover game developed by Epic had been delayed.
Dragon Quest is a popular franchise with many hardcore fans who fell in love with the early games due to the creativity and imagination displayed in their fantasy worlds. It was the hard work of human creators, like Horii himself or Akira Toriyama—who was in charge of character design—that breathed life into these worlds.
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The article notes that one has to wonder if fans will show the same level of appreciation for games entirely developed by AI.
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